Wink bills itself as a “People Search Engine,” but in reality it’s a lot more than that. Wink.com is a fairly robust social network with plenty of social media features like people tagging, comment walls, friending, “winking,” and user profiles.
The core service of the Wink widget is to display a list of profile URLs, but it also packs a bit more functionality. It sucks favicons from each of your sites and displays them in the widget, it provides a search field that lets you search for other people (by company, URL, name, etc.), and it displays the user’s people tags.
You would expect that clicking on a people tag would show you a list of other folks who have tagged themselves with the same word. It does not. It takes you to a “Topic” page that combines a list of blogs that have been tagged with that word, a feed of related Google News stories, and other content pulled from users’ profile pages. Here's the topic page for Burritos.
Judging from the careful way that these pages have been optimized (title tags, URL structure), these would appear to be landing pages built for search engines. Sort of like Squidoo lenses that are aggregated from individual profile pages, as opposed to explicitly built. I find this very clever. Spread and remix your content to give organic search more ways to find you.
So this is how I would break down Wink’s service. Their core business is people search. In order to execute, they need to build a massive database of people related Meta data – tags, associated sites, interests, etc. The social networking aspect of Wink is the data collection tool to get folks to add this info to the Wink database. The topic pages are the vehicle to maximize the SEO value of this user submitted content, and to slice and dice this content into millions of optimized landing pages – with an end goal of acquiring more profiles. And finally, the profile aggregator widget is yet another channel for Wink to gain more profiles – this time by letting existing Wink members do their marketing. It also provides additional entry points into what will eventually be their money maker – the people search box.
After digging into this, I would not call Wink a distributed social network. Sure it has widget tentacles that reach out to the edge, but the purpose of these widgets is to not exist as a standalone network, but to suck new profile data back into the central db to strengthen their people search.
From where I’m standing, this looks like a formidable company with a good grasp of social media, widget marketing, and SEO. Watch out for these guys.
Excellent observations...Well written and easy to understand.Thanks
Posted by: celebrity video | July 04, 2009 at 03:30 AM